Sirât: The Bridge We Are Already On

I had to look away at the end.

Two people, walking through a minefield. No music. No dialogue. No safety. Just bodies moving forward because forward is the only direction left. I watched it through my fingers like a child watching a horror film, except this wasn't horror. This was something stranger. A film that had spent two hours stripping away every layer of protection until there was nothing between me and the screen but the question it was asking.

I want to talk about that question. And I'm going to spoil the whole film to do it, because there is no way to honour what Oliver Laxe made without going all the way into it.

Spoilers from here. Watch it first. Then come back.

The surface premise is simple. A father and his son arrive at a rave in the Moroccan mountains looking for the daughter who vanished months ago at another one. They follow a convoy of ravers deeper into the desert in search of one last party, hoping she'll be there. She isn't. The son dies. The ravers die, one by one, until the last two and the father cross a minefield into nothing.

If you describe it like that, it sounds like a survival thriller with a nihilistic ending. It isn't. It's an anatomy.

Here is what I think Sirât actually is:

It was never about her.

Mar - the missing daughter, the absent centre, the reason for the journey, never appears. We don't get a flashback. We don't get a phone call. We don't get her diary. She is the engine of the whole film and she is structurally, deliberately, completely absent.

Mar isn't a character. She's the thing the psyche is looking for. The lost feminine. The vanished wholeness. The part of the self that walked into the music one night and never came back. Whatever it is for you, she is that. And the film is what the rest of the self does when she's gone.

Which means every other person in the convoy isn't a character either. They're parts.

The father - grief in human form, walking. The son - innocence that doesn't survive the desert. Steff and Josh and Bigui and Tonin and Jade - Laxe cast non-professionals, people with missing limbs, weathered faces, lives lived off the grid. The "marginals," critics keep calling them. But that's exactly what they are inside us too. The amputated parts. The parts polite society has trained us not to look at. Lust. Limbs. Ugly to look at. Kind but scary. Tender but broken.

The whole convoy is one person walking across the Sirāt.

That's why the opening text is the entire film. Sirāt: a bridge thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword, hotter than fire. The film isn't about the bridge. The film is the crossing. And the crossing strips you, one part at a time, until what's left is the part that no longer fears the falling.

Then there is the war.

Radio fragments. Convoys in the distance. Borders closing. Something happening, somewhere, that nobody quite names. People keep asking - is the world at war in the movie? Is it set in the future? Is it real?

I don't think it matters. I think that's the point.

If Laxe named the war - Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan, some near-future thing, the film would collapse into commentary. By leaving it ambient, he makes the war do exactly what war does in our actual lives right now. It bleeds through the speakers while we're trying to dance. It shapes every decision without ever being the decision. It's the weather the soul is moving through.

We can dance, but we can't escape. That's the line that won't leave me.

The rave isn't separate from the war. They are the same frequency. The bass is trying to drown out the artillery and it can't, because they were never different sounds. The ravers aren't escaping reality. They are the ones who have already accepted it and are dancing on the bridge anyway. That's why they are the only ones who can make the journey, they've already given up the illusion that the ground is solid.

This is a film about now. About this exact moment. The dancing while the world burns. The searching for what we've lost while losing more of ourselves in the search. The slow realisation that the bridge was never separate from the fire.

The son falling off the mountain is the moment the film becomes something else entirely. Up until then you can still read it as a survival thriller. After that, all the rules are off. Laxe is telling you: this isn't a film about whether they find her. It's a film about what you become while looking.

And then the father walks through the minefield.

He doesn't walk through it because he's brave. He walks through it because Mar is gone, his son Esteban is gone, and fear is gone too, because fear is what you have when there is still something left to lose. He has nothing left to lose. That's the Sirāt. You don't cross it by being righteous or careful or prepared. You cross it after everything that was holding you back has already been taken.

We came in looking for a missing girl. We left having found something else.

That's the whole spiritual logic of the film, and possibly of this entire moment we're living through. You go looking for what you've lost. The looking changes you. By the time you understand the journey, you are no longer the person who started it.

I had to look away at the end because some part of me knew that the minefield isn't a metaphor. The ground under all of us right now is not as solid as we are pretending. We are dancing on it because dancing is what humans do when the artillery is too loud to bear. We are walking across a bridge thinner than a hair and we have trained ourselves not to look down.

Laxe made me look down.

That is what the film is, and why it won the Cannes Jury Prize, and why I think it will outlast almost everything else released this year. Not because it's a thriller, though it is. Not because it's beautiful, though it is. But because he found a way to make the bridge visible.

And once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it.

We came looking for something. We found something else.

That something else is us.